Ok, no post that last weekend. You’ll get one soon, I promise.

Quick summary:
- I got sick again.
- I got better.
- I had 1 midterm and 1 assignment so far this week.
- I have 2 more midterms and 1 more assignment this week.

*Groan*

You wanted photos, you got photos. They’re from my cellphone, so not the greatest of qualities.
These are from yesterday, while I was driving along the highway (worry not, my passanger took the pictures and no cars were harmed in their making).

I’ve been indulging myself in the brilliance of Don Hertzfeldt’s animations (maker of the infamous film Rejected).

I haven’t had time to do anything interesting this week other than the usual meeting new people, fixing strangers’ computers, and repairing software written in my highschool days. My midterms and assignments are rushing me like bunch of evil balloons of doom. Speaking of Doom, ptEAreakrnab2!#@!#`1!. I am repeatedly reminded of the fact that it’s going to hit theaters soon, this worries me immensely - like them religious people are worried of judgement day. I can’t wait for the day when it’s no longer on the horizon (I just hope that there is a horizon remaining).

Expect to hear more whining about my midterms and assignments next week.

Yesterday, I went to the Niagara Fallsview Casino at which I went on to waste $60 on blackjack. It was mildly fun, and I may consider doing it again after a prolonged period when I have excess money secreting from my facial pores (kind of like Ming — don’t tell him that I publically revealed his secret source of monetary income).

Did you know they offer free beverages? I bet you thought they offered free alcohol? Nope, just free non-alcoholic beverages. Apparently they’re not allowed to serve alcohol free of charge. (Can you tell that I just ran out of things to write real quick? But it is useful knowledge: Don’t be shy to order a pop or juice from the busty waitresses. Or rather, don’t expect to be stuck with a bill to pay whence their cleavage returns. Also, don’t expect them to show up ever again to take your empty cup from you. Once you have a cup, you’re stuck with it. Forever. Unless you can trick one of your friends to hold it for you and then run away. Didn’t work for me though. Ok, hang tight, I’m breaking out of the parenthesis. *Struggle*) *Pop* Ah.

I am glad Serenity is holding a, much deserved, respectable 8.6/10 rating on IMDb. On the other hand, I’m disappointed that it barely made any money (something along the lines of just under 11 million in the opening weekend), though it’s not too terrible for a modest budget of 40 million.

Arbitrary link of the arbitrary unit of time: Can you take hat hair too far?

I’m leaving this space empty for when I think of more things I wanted to mention.
____________________ …

I went to see Serenity yesterday, aaall by myseeeelf.

As many have said, it is most excellently superb. For some reason, I feel that if you must compare it to something, which I don’t condone, it would be to StarWars. And only reason you’d compare it to StarWars would be to illustrate how different–nay, better, it is than StarWars. Joss Whedon does a great job at “telling a story”, instead of just making Yet Another Movie.

It was good that I went alone, for it gave me the much necessary liberty to cry a little. I’ll most definitely be watching this movie again. In fact, it’s possible that this may be the first movie I buy on DVD in the history of me buying movies on DVD. This movie has made it up to my Top 10 favourite movies list as swiftly as a sandwich makes it down Andrew’s insanely overactive digestive system.

On a non-Joss Whedon theme, I discovered another gem this week:

Writely : A fully-featured web-based Word Processor. Excellent for doing homework abroad. I was very impressed about the UI, and already IRL-logged to all of you about how great I think it is, but I’m posting it here anyways.

Now, something that you didn’t know: Heh you thought I was going to tell you something you didn’t know, you’re so gullible.

Ok, here’s your homework: Should I get a PSP? Convince me (in either direction). Good luck.

Update: Ah, I remember what else I wanted to mention. I saw the preview for The Legend of Zoro, and it looks just like ye ol’ Desperado, but with swords! It actually looks kind of neat, and amusing since Catherine Zeta-Jones remains unaged since the original Mask of Zoro 8 years ago. That is all. (Actually, it’s likely I’ll think of something else.)

Another Update: See? Told you it was a coming. Another trailer I saw before Serenity was the. Excuse me, I must start another sentence so that Serenity wont be mentioned in the same sentence as the forthcoming movie. Yes, I saw the trailer for Doom. Oh god. Did you know IT’S IN FIRST PERSON? (Or at least significant parts of it are.) Eeeeeeeehgpth! *Shudders*
Great, now I’m going to have nightmares, for all the wrong reasons.

I finally got sick. After a 2-something year streak of sick-less operating, I caught a cold, which turned into a fever, then burned off into a nasty cough. In the process, I missed 3 days of school. I’m feeling somewhat better these days, but still residual sickness lingers.

Now, allow me to take a moment and remind everybody what’s occuring in the world of television — at least that which matters to me.

- C.S.I is back with Season 6. Episode 1 awaits me, but I haven’t watched yet.

- Joey is back too, apparently, with Season 2. I’m getting the first episode, in no particular rush.

- Lost, which is the most important one, is back with Season 2. I watched the first episode last night. Oh golly. I wanted to freak out with someone, but no one online on my contact list watches Lost, so I had to freak out quietly by myself under my desk. Eeeeeeeeee!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeee!!

I’m ok… So, here’s the highlight links of this week:

- Flying Spaghetti Monster, spreading the noodly appendage goodness.

- Fortune Turkey, a Turkey™ frontend for unixy fortune goodness.

That’s all for now. I made some minor fixes for shazow.net, but they don’t concern you. :O

Oh yeah, one more thing — my student number is divisible by 42.

Update: Added the date to each box. You’ll probably need to refresh in order to fetch the new CSS data. Anyone know of a hack to force expiry on the CSS? Like sending a sort of last-modified header, to tell the browser that the existing copy might be stale. Maybe I’ll look into it later.
(By the way, incase you didn’t know, you can get detailed timestamp information by hovering over the post’s title.)

I have complied to your cries and added an RSS Feed. Next thing to come is an embedded feed on the sidebar with “recent activity”.

I’ve been working on fail-safing the blog-posting mechanism so that inferior mortals could append their musings here. That will come sooner or later.

Now, to make this a bit bloggier, I’ll give you a status report on my schooling:

- Money spent on textbooks this semester: $257

- Courses that are birdy: 0 (Although I am taking one first-year course (Economics), but it is comparably difficult to real bird courses.)

- Courses of DOOM: 1 (Computational Complexity & Computability)

- Courses which are described as “more difficult than this course” by the Courses of DOOM: 1 (Operating Systems)

- Courses that I might have some fun with (probably not): 1 (Databases)

- Courses that make me throw up, but then make me eat up the vomit because I had something really good for lunch that day and don’t want to waste it: 1 (Programming Languages)

Overall, things are going according to plan. Only inconvenience is that some of my backend for shazow.net isn’t optimal (just patched it together real fast to get it released before school started), so if I add more modules and features, that means they’ll be incompatable once I rework it. So I’m reluctant to make anything particularly wild… Oh wells.

I go keep company to the couch.

Update: Gentoo Forum finds of the night

Brilliant: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2729108.html#2729108
More brilliant: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-1969115.html#1969115

Added a new “chat” feature for shazow.net. Now you’ll be able to reply with your comments under each post (click on the title to open it) in a chat-like fashion. You don’t have to be logged in, either. To avoid fraud, logged-in users get the benefit of having their names in a flashy orange. Right now there’s no spam protection, so be gentle. If there’s abuse, then I’m injecting the turkey of doom with steroids and unleashing it.

Next thing on the agenda is making a sort of alert to tell you where there may have been new content posted since you last visited. Such as letting you know if someone wrote anything interesting in a chat under some ancient article which you’re not likely to dig through by yourself.

There are a couple of people that will be added to the blogger group soon, so you’ll get to hear their colourful commentary on the topic of me.

Finally: School starts tomorrow.
For those interested, you can review my schedule in my file repository.

If some things look improperly coloured (like, plain), refresh the page to clear your computer of the old style sheet.

There’s no real point in making an account at the moment. I haven’t had the chance to write any commenting feature yet, but that’ll be the next thing to come.

For now, this will be my blog again.

What this really is (because you can’t really tell since you’re¹ not a mind-reading computer-science-appreciating audience) is a brilliantly designed foundation for a modular content management system. It’s the meat for many potentially wonderful creatures.

The big downside to this is that the foundation was so complex and difficult to design and develop, that now I’m all burnt out and don’t have the will to create useful modules for it, like a commenting system, or displaying currently online users, or the like. But luckily, this already has a few benefits that the old shazow.net didn’t have:

1. I have a full, functional, permissions system. That means I can let other people post blogs, and much more later on (like creating groups, structured accounts, limiting accessibility, and so forth).

2. It’s no longer has a feces-coloured colourscheme. Personally, I find this a rather unfortunate drawback, but you people seem to favour the blue and gray.

3. I must say, my new admin UI is pretty slick. :D

Anyways, if you feel that you have something to say here often, then make an account, and I can give you permission to post.

^{1. This entire entry is directed to my audience consisting of about 3 people. Yay.}

P.S.
If you miss the turkey, you can visit it here. That is, until I kill it and eat it.

P.P.S.
If you get a message saying “invalid login/password” or the like, that’s because there were stale cookies left over from the old site. Refreshing should remove them, and all will be well.